Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Tracy, we recently did another special live episode at the
Speaker 2: New York Public Library.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a really great venue, a really special evening, and
Speaker 3: fittingly given that we were recording at a library, the
Speaker 3: library in New York, it was all about a new.
Speaker 1: Book, that's right.
Speaker 2: It was a pretty fitting location. So you were going
Speaker 2: to listen to our live episode that we recorded with
Speaker 2: Chris Hughes. He's actually one of the original founders of Facebook,
Speaker 2: but he left fairly early into the company's journey. He's
Speaker 2: currently getting his PhD at Penn in economics and he's
Speaker 2: the author of the book Market Crafters, One hundred Year
Speaker 2: Struggle to Shape the American Economy.
Speaker 3: Yep, take a listen.
Speaker 2: Thrilled to be a chatting why market craft? You know,
Speaker 2: we talk people use the term industrial policy a lot
Speaker 2: these days. It's got very hot over the last several years.
Speaker 2: What is market craft mean? Why title it that?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 5: Hello, Hello, I'm happy to be here. And before I
Speaker 5: answer exactly what market craft is? And we spend the
Speaker 5: next hour talking about it. I just have to say
Speaker 5: that it is such a huge honor to be both
Speaker 5: here at the library and institution that I care immensely about,
Speaker 5: and to be a guest on this live tapings.
Speaker 4: Than is my number one favorite podcast, and so we.
Speaker 2: Love when they say that on the recording. But that
Speaker 2: is a good reminder. It is a live taping, so you.
Speaker 1: Know, silence cell phones, you can you can share it.
Speaker 1: Clap a little bit.
Speaker 5: So market craft, what is it? The basic idea is
Speaker 5: that policy makers are often harnessing and shaping, harnessing private
Speaker 5: markets and pointing them towards public goals like making Americans richer, safer,
Speaker 5: and more economically secure, and that there's actually a very
Speaker 5: long history of doing that in the United States. It's
Speaker 5: done by Republicans, it's done by Democrats. It's done to
Speaker 5: ensure energy stability, financial stability, or make semiconductors here at home.
Speaker 5: There are a ton of successes in the past, plenty
Speaker 5: of failures, and the whole point of writing the book
Speaker 5: was to try to tease out what are the lessons
Speaker 5: for our contemporary policy environment today, because we're going to
Speaker 5: have to rebuild on the other side of the chaos
Speaker 5: that exists in the world right now.
Speaker 3: So just on this point, I mean, a large part
Speaker 3: of the book is pointing out that the US does
Speaker 3: in fact have this history of market craft as you
Speaker 3: put it, and certainly other countries this is kind of
Speaker 3: the norm. You know, Norway has sovereign wealth funds, parts
Speaker 3: of the Middle East have sovereign wealth funds. Even in
Speaker 3: economies that aren't necessarily centrally controlled, there's a bigger role
Speaker 3: for governments to play in the economy. And yet in
Speaker 3: the US up until fairly recently, I think it's fair
Speaker 3: to say industrial policy was almost like a dirty word,
Speaker 3: and there's this knee jerk reaction to this idea.
Speaker 4: Why is that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I think, listen, we all exist with
Speaker 5: this idea in our heads that markets exist and are
Speaker 5: almost forces of nature, and then on the other side
Speaker 5: of the balance sheet there's government. I mean, I'm the
Speaker 5: first to say that the language that I've used for
Speaker 5: years has been around verbs like to intervene, as if
Speaker 5: markets come first, and then government is just like the
Speaker 5: emergency room that happens when things go awry and you've
Speaker 5: got to bail out a bank. And the whole point
Speaker 5: of My book is to say, actually, something bigger is happening.
Speaker 5: Like if you look at the American economy between healthcare, pharmaceuticals, aviation, semiconductor,
Speaker 5: and high tech clean energy, and add up the size
Speaker 5: of these industries, you are well over half of American
Speaker 5: GDP in industries where the state not just has a
Speaker 5: heavy hand, but is actually crafting it from the beginning.
Speaker 5: And so it is about industrial policy. There's a lot
Speaker 5: in there about industrial policy, but it's actually about something bigger.
Speaker 5: Market craft is something that encompasses what the FED does
Speaker 5: in financial markets, what the Strategic Petroleum Reserve does in
Speaker 5: energy markets. There's a whole set of strategies that I
Speaker 5: think we have to be wrestling with.
Speaker 2: All Right, I had a question that I was going
Speaker 2: to save to near the end after we had gotten
Speaker 2: more relaxed, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But I've decided just do it. I've just decided that
Speaker 1: I'm just.
Speaker 2: Going to jump in with this question, which is you're
Speaker 2: one of the co founders of Facebook.
Speaker 4: Many people in.
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley and tech have enjoyed extraordinary fortunes under a
Speaker 2: sort of existing market economic regime, and in recent years
Speaker 2: we've seen a number of them become seemingly very hostile
Speaker 2: towards the public sector, the sort of emergent anti state politics,
Speaker 2: and people have different theories. So people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: they got their feelings hurt from the New York Times
Speaker 2: or something like that. What is your theory for the
Speaker 2: emergence of this?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean it's hard not to have that image
Speaker 5: of Bezos and Zuckerberg and the whole crew behind Trump
Speaker 5: at the inauguration and just see that and say, what
Speaker 5: are those guys hoping for? You know, certainly it's to
Speaker 5: make more money somewhat, but I think it's about something bigger.
Speaker 5: I think they want to have more power, they want
Speaker 5: to have more respect, and they feel like in the
Speaker 5: Biden years there was too much focus on things like
Speaker 5: competition and fair markets. But if you fast forward, I
Speaker 5: mean it's not even been one hundred days. You know,
Speaker 5: the trial against Facebook is ongoing. Mark Zuckerberg was on
Speaker 5: the stand for much of last week. If you're not
Speaker 5: following it closely, the FTC filed suit against Uber two
Speaker 5: days ago, and there's and Google just last week lost
Speaker 5: its second antitrust case with a federal prosecuted by the
Speaker 5: Justice Department, making clear that it's a monopoly. So we're
Speaker 5: only a few months in and you squint and you
Speaker 5: look at you're like, what are these guys getting out
Speaker 5: of this? It doesn't seem like very much since you
Speaker 5: brought up the FTC.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is something I don't think a lot
Speaker 3: of people were expecting this to happen. But like, anti
Speaker 3: monopoly seems to be a through line between Biden and
Speaker 3: Trump to some extent, right and certainly pursuing some actions
Speaker 3: against big tech. Why do you think that is? Like
Speaker 3: why is this an area of consensus? And then just
Speaker 3: going back to Joe's question, you think any of those
Speaker 3: guys who were standing at Trump's inauguration are they happy
Speaker 3: with the current situation?
Speaker 4: I don't think so.
Speaker 5: No, But you know, anti monopoly is a bit how
Speaker 5: I got into market craft in the first place. So
Speaker 5: about six years ago I wrote an article in New
Speaker 5: York Times saying that I thought Facebook should undergo structural
Speaker 5: separation or breakup, that its corporate power had become too
Speaker 5: concentrated and it become a monopoly. And that started me
Speaker 5: on a journey of really wrestling with the history of
Speaker 5: anti monopoly in the United States. And you can't think
Speaker 5: about that set of topics without seeing public actors saying, hey,
Speaker 5: we want markets to work a certain way. We don't
Speaker 5: think that they should be concentrated with a lot of power.
Speaker 5: We think they should be competitive. We think it should
Speaker 5: be easy for new entrants to come in and innovate.
Speaker 5: We think markets should keep prices low, wages up, and
Speaker 5: innovation going. And so we are going to use the
Speaker 5: tools of public policy to craft those markets to ensure
Speaker 5: that's the case. Whether it's the free market going to
Speaker 5: lead to it or not, it really doesn't matter, because
Speaker 5: we have this goal as a common good. And so
Speaker 5: once you sort of once I began to see that
Speaker 5: in the anti monopoly world, you quickly saw it at
Speaker 5: the FED as an institution that you know, most free
Speaker 5: market Bible thumping folks would say that they appreciate, but
Speaker 5: you know, the FED sets the price of short term
Speaker 5: credit and is actively in markets buffering that price through
Speaker 5: open market operations. And then if things really go awry,
Speaker 5: you bet it's going to be there to step in
Speaker 5: to stabilize, so that market is crafted and managed every
Speaker 5: single day for stability. And so I began to see
Speaker 5: all these kind of cross pollinations and similar trends and
Speaker 5: that you know, a couple of years later, here's the
Speaker 5: fruit of that.
Speaker 1: I have one. I want to go back to resentful
Speaker 1: billionaires again and do it, and I have a different
Speaker 1: You're not the only worry. But tell me if it's
Speaker 1: total nonsense.
Speaker 2: You know, I tweet all day because I want people
Speaker 2: to hear all my thoughts. And you wrote a book,
Speaker 2: you left Facebook, and you're an economist and you're published
Speaker 2: a book that's influential and intellectual. How much is it
Speaker 2: about resent that they're extremely wealthy and successful, but they
Speaker 2: also want to be regarded as smart.
Speaker 3: This, in my opinion, is why Twitter exists, Like this.
Speaker 2: Is my impression, so that there is that they also
Speaker 2: want to be market crafters.
Speaker 4: They don't just.
Speaker 2: Want to be market competitors. They want to My sense
Speaker 2: is that we all want to be market crafters. And
Speaker 2: how much is it about they felt like, yeah, incredibly successful,
Speaker 2: but they didn't get to help craft it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's I think that's directly right.
Speaker 5: I should say I try very hard to avoid social
Speaker 5: media so that you're not on the blue app. I'm
Speaker 5: not on Instagram, I lark on Twitter. I recently opened
Speaker 5: a blue Sky account. It doesn't have a lot of followers,
Speaker 5: be great if I had a couple more, But so
Speaker 5: I'm not actively using social media, so it's harder for
Speaker 5: me to weigh in on that.
Speaker 4: But I am.
Speaker 5: I do think that there is this lurking desire to
Speaker 5: partner with government in some cases in craft markets. And
Speaker 5: so there's a very crisp example. It's not from one
Speaker 5: of the current billionaires. But there's this guy, Robert Nois,
Speaker 5: which some of you may have heard of. He was
Speaker 5: one of the co founders of Intel. Grew up as
Speaker 5: a son of a Congregationalist minister and a family in Iowa,
Speaker 5: ends up going to MIT and then invents the integrated circuit,
Speaker 5: which is a fundamental part of the semiconductor makes gobs
Speaker 5: of money, and after years of that, guess what happens
Speaker 5: in the mid nineteen eighties Japan. Japan as an industry
Speaker 5: starts really out competing the American semi conductor manufacturing market.
Speaker 5: They are moving faster, they have their own industrial policy
Speaker 5: that's pushing it. And so all of a sudden, Noise,
Speaker 5: who had for his entire life been a libertarian who
Speaker 5: didn't want anything to do with government, thought it was
Speaker 5: not a great idea, would have liked to downsize it
Speaker 5: as we're seeing other billionaires be interested in today, all
Speaker 5: of a sudden he shows up in Washington and he says,
Speaker 5: wait a second, we need an industrial policy for semiconductors
Speaker 5: and for chips. And the Defense Department agrees because they're
Speaker 5: concerned for national security reasons and noise, and the government
Speaker 5: effectively partner because their interests at that moment are overlapping.
Speaker 5: We get something called semitech which is created, which is
Speaker 5: about a billion dollars. It's invested to enable the semiconductor
Speaker 5: companies to begin coordinating, making their vertical their supply chains
Speaker 5: vertically more integrated and more efficient, and a few years later,
Speaker 5: America recaptures its market share and globally of semiconductors, we're
Speaker 5: back on the top. So, you know, I think that
Speaker 5: the lesson from that is complicated because on the one hand,
Speaker 5: you do see a private sector actor with a lot
Speaker 5: to gain from private private wealth maximization, but working with
Speaker 5: the public sector, where the public sector also has a
Speaker 5: lot to gain from semiconductors being made in the United States,
Speaker 5: and in that case it worked for both. It doesn't
Speaker 5: always work out like that. But I think that's clear
Speaker 5: historical evidence of the fact that there is this lurking
Speaker 5: desire for market craft on the part of a lot
Speaker 5: of these folks.
Speaker 3: Now I'm torn whether I should ask another question about
Speaker 3: angry billionaires who tweet a lot, or about the books.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to try to thread the needle elon
Speaker 3: musk at Doje. It's a very active organization. Some would say,
Speaker 3: would that count as market craft under your framework?
Speaker 4: No? No, no, But I mean seriously, it's.
Speaker 5: That's just tearing apart the federal government and the administrative Yeah, because.
Speaker 3: Your book is actually emphasizes the importance of institutions.
Speaker 5: It's the exact inverse. So my book makes the case
Speaker 5: that when market craft is successful, you have administrative agencies
Speaker 5: like the Chips Office, like the FED, like this SPR
Speaker 5: that have a clear mission on chore semiconductors, keep financial
Speaker 5: markets stable, et cetera.
Speaker 4: And then they have the discretion to pursue.
Speaker 5: That mission and the ability to get it done. And
Speaker 5: that it is critical to understand that institutions in America
Speaker 5: need that power in order to make markets work more effectively.
Speaker 5: That doesn't mean that they're always perfect, but we get
Speaker 5: much worse outcomes when we create these balkanized sort of
Speaker 5: hybrid setups, and that's what you see in something like
Speaker 5: healthcare markets today. So the importance of institutions is at
Speaker 5: the center of this book, and my belief in Musk
Speaker 5: and Crewer just trying to demolish all of them.
Speaker 3: So on the institution's point, I mean, I think part
Speaker 3: of the institution's problem in US politics is that you
Speaker 3: get a lot of people who think that these are
Speaker 3: unelected officials with a lot of power, you know, those
Speaker 3: sort of like Ivory Tower bureaucrats who are deciding everything.
Speaker 3: How do you, I guess, how do you overcome that
Speaker 3: sort of instinctual I guess negativity towards building more institutions
Speaker 3: in the US government?
Speaker 5: I think you show people where it works, and you
Speaker 5: have to be clear about where institutions actually deliver for people.
Speaker 5: So I'll give you an example that's a little bit
Speaker 5: further back in history. So the book starts with the
Speaker 5: story of the National Investment Bank that we create in
Speaker 5: the depression. In nineteen thirty two, Herbert Hoover, actually a Republican,
Speaker 5: creates an institution called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, with a
Speaker 5: clear mandate, first to reinforce capitalism that was disintegrating at
Speaker 5: the time, and then a few years later the mandate
Speaker 5: expands to actually spur development. At the head of this
Speaker 5: thing is this larger than life figure named Jesse Jones.
Speaker 5: So this guy was born in Tennessee, but he moves
Speaker 5: to Texas at a young age. He invests in all
Speaker 5: kinds of local businesses, and by the time he's thirty,
Speaker 5: he's a millionaire. And a few years later he's got
Speaker 5: so much money that he's building buildings in New York
Speaker 5: City and all across the Eastern seaboard. Then nineteen twenty
Speaker 5: nine happens, and he has less to do, so he does.
Speaker 5: He is a Democratic Party activist. He's been a fundraiser
Speaker 5: for a long time, even shares an office with Roosevelt
Speaker 5: in nineteen twenty four. He convinces the Democrats to have
Speaker 5: their convention in Houston in nineteen twenty eight, where oh
Speaker 5: so conveniently, balloons fall from the ceiling that say Jesse
Speaker 5: Jones for President.
Speaker 4: He's like a larger than.
Speaker 5: Life figure, but he's at the head of this bank,
Speaker 5: this institution, the National Investment Bank, And when he comes
Speaker 5: into power. At the beginning, he says, you know, our
Speaker 5: first mission is going to be to reinforce all of
Speaker 5: the private commercial banks, recapitalize them, make sure that they're
Speaker 5: ready for deposit insurance. But then in the second phase,
Speaker 5: on the advice of John Maynard Kaines and some other
Speaker 5: economists Jones and consultation with Roosevelt, says, we got to
Speaker 5: really deploy public capital into the American economy, particularly in
Speaker 5: industries that are going to encourage a lot of employment
Speaker 5: and make things cheaper for consumers. So they prioritize housing,
Speaker 5: and they build a kind of institution that's named Fanny
Speaker 5: May which endures obviously today, and they invent the thirty
Speaker 5: year mortgage, which at the time mortgages had been ten years.
Speaker 5: By expanding it to thirty years, the cost of housing
Speaker 5: comes down significantly, and all of a sudden you see
Speaker 5: a boom in housing. And then there's a third phase
Speaker 5: in the war years where they bird the aviation industry
Speaker 5: and synthetic rubber and all kinds of other things. And
Speaker 5: so my point is is you see a man who
Speaker 5: comes in skeptical of, you know, of the far left.
Speaker 5: In the New Deal period, certainly wouldn't have identified with
Speaker 5: those folks, But who ends up believing in and building
Speaker 5: an institution of American capitalism that crafts markets toward a
Speaker 5: common good. And so that example is really inspiring. It's
Speaker 5: further back in history, but we've got all kinds of
Speaker 5: things that are closer.
Speaker 2: One of the criticisms of a lot of legacy institutions,
Speaker 2: whether it's universities or various parts of the public sector,
Speaker 2: et cetera, that comes from the right is that they've
Speaker 2: lost their own sense of mission. We have to tear
Speaker 2: them down because they have lost their own sense of mission.
Speaker 2: They're consumed with niche obsessions, consumed with identity things like
Speaker 2: that that are unrelated to their mission of whatever it
Speaker 2: is their building, whether it's homes, whether it's semiconductors, whether
Speaker 2: it's education. When you look at the history, do you
Speaker 2: see any evidence of sort of mission deviation or institutions
Speaker 2: that have lost their north star.
Speaker 5: It's not a pattern that I saw in the research
Speaker 5: of the book. And if that happens, that's what Congress
Speaker 5: is for. I mean, the Congress holds institutions accountable and
Speaker 5: monitors their activity. I mean, take the Chips Act. It
Speaker 5: was passed in twenty twenty two. But chips was actually
Speaker 5: an idea from the first Trump.
Speaker 4: Era that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well yeah, and the Undersecretary of State for Economic
Speaker 5: Affairs and a whole set of folks were very.
Speaker 4: Invested in it.
Speaker 5: It gains steam and is passed in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: and then you know, quite quickly.
Speaker 4: Money begins to move.
Speaker 5: Congress actually a year later, says, you know what, We're
Speaker 5: going to exempt semiconductor construction from NIPA requirements, making the
Speaker 5: environmental requirements that in some cases could have made it
Speaker 5: harder to build. So Congress stepped in to make sure
Speaker 5: that something that they did actually happened more effectively. Or
Speaker 5: similarly with the FED, I mean, Congress is constantly tweaking
Speaker 5: the FED. Who gets to decide who's going to be
Speaker 5: a reserve beank president, even in some cases the methodologies
Speaker 5: for monetary policy implementation.
Speaker 4: So I think accountability is very important.
Speaker 5: But accountability rests in the legislative branch, not with an
Speaker 5: impulsive billionaire just running through town with a hammer.
Speaker 3: Speaking of the FED, I think you mentioned that you
Speaker 3: initially set out to write a book just right like
Speaker 3: what was the Cause of the Switch? And then I
Speaker 3: guess how did that inform your research process?
Speaker 4: So I have a special place in my heart for
Speaker 4: fed history.
Speaker 5: I've been working on a dissertation at Wharton for a
Speaker 5: few years which is more properly narrow and focused on
Speaker 5: that topic, and I thought that's what this book was
Speaker 5: going to be initially. But then when the conversation around
Speaker 5: industrial policy exploded, and the the Climate Bill happened, the
Speaker 5: Chips Bill happened, the Infrastructure Bill happened, a new conversation
Speaker 5: around tariffs in the Biden administration was happening, it felt
Speaker 5: like there was a bigger story to tell and the
Speaker 5: challenge that the thing I wanted to do was to
Speaker 5: explain how did we get from the era that I
Speaker 5: grew up in, you know, the Clinton and George W.
Speaker 5: Bush era where most people thought markets self regulate and
Speaker 5: work on their own, to a moment where both parties,
Speaker 5: both Democrats and Republicans, put the state at the center
Speaker 5: of the economic story. And I wanted to track that
Speaker 5: history in the past fifteen years and see it through
Speaker 5: the Great Recession and then the challenge of climate and
Speaker 5: then the rise of China and the pandemic, and understand
Speaker 5: how you got these bizarre agreements, like you know, almost
Speaker 5: a dozen Republicans voting for Lena Khan in the Senate
Speaker 5: to run the FTC. How did that happen? Where did
Speaker 5: that come from? And how enduring might that be? And
Speaker 5: that set of questions then took me way back into
Speaker 5: history and then back into the present day, and well,
Speaker 5: how did we.
Speaker 1: Get twelve Senate Republicans to vote for Lena Khan.
Speaker 5: I think the confluence of those four events made Americans,
Speaker 5: let alone policy makers, realized that markets don't just take
Speaker 5: care of themselves, and that that whole idea, that whole story,
Speaker 5: wasn't working. That capitalism needs to be cultivated, and that
Speaker 5: markets need to be cared for. In the introduction of
Speaker 5: the book, I talk about this metaphor of a vegetable garden,
Speaker 5: which might seem a little hokey, but at least for me,
Speaker 5: it's personal because when I grew up, I grew up
Speaker 5: in North Carolina in a small town, and my dad
Speaker 5: tilled up a third of the backyard to make a
Speaker 5: vegetable garden and constantly forced me in the summers to
Speaker 5: go like weed and pick green beans and steak tomatoes
Speaker 5: and do all these things that I did not want
Speaker 5: to do. Yeah, a lot of people enjoy this, it
Speaker 5: turns out me.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 5: But nonetheless, I spent an inordinate amount of time in
Speaker 5: that garden. And so when I started to think about, like, well,
Speaker 5: what are markets like if they're not these self regulating systems,
Speaker 5: the best metaphor that I that I landed upon is
Speaker 5: a garden because it recognizes there are organic forces that
Speaker 5: can sometimes be unruly, that won't necessarily cooperate and just
Speaker 5: do exactly what you want to do. But it also
Speaker 5: recognizes that you need care and cultivation to steer those plants.
Speaker 5: You need to plant some things in the sun and
Speaker 5: some things in the shades. You need fertilizer for some things,
Speaker 5: you need to get the weeds out for others. You
Speaker 5: need to shape these markets. You need to point them
Speaker 5: in a direction to ensure they're actually working, that they're
Speaker 5: producing a harvest that you want to eat and then
Speaker 5: and that is going to be nutritious. And so I
Speaker 5: kept coming back to that metaphor, and I think it
Speaker 5: is the right.
Speaker 4: One to think about how markets actually work.
Speaker 3: I want to say one thing about gardening, which is
Speaker 3: everyone has this image in their minds that it's like
Speaker 3: this really peaceful like pastoral activity, and it's not. It
Speaker 3: is like this violent struggle to stop everything from.
Speaker 4: Killing each other. Basically.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I like the metaphor, okay, speaking of bad
Speaker 3: stuff happening. Almost every example in your book of you know,
Speaker 3: instances of market craft actually developing stems from a crisis
Speaker 3: of one sort or another. There's the Great Depression, There's
Speaker 3: obviously the COVID pandemic. You know, high inflation, high oil prices,
Speaker 3: things like that. Do you have to have a market
Speaker 3: crisis before people can start building consensus that there is
Speaker 3: actually a role for the government to come in and
Speaker 3: try to achieve some policy aims through market craft.
Speaker 5: No, but it helps, and it's always matters how you
Speaker 5: define the crisis. You know, there are several examples of
Speaker 5: market crafters who are very successful in the book, who
Speaker 5: are not responding to crisis. So I have an extended
Speaker 5: passage on Alan Greenspan, who is normally not thought of
Speaker 5: as like a market crafting kind of guy. He's supposed
Speaker 5: to be the deregulator in chief, and he did do
Speaker 5: plenty of that when he was the Chair of the FED,
Speaker 5: But he also had a vision, And so I'm going
Speaker 5: to use him as an example to make to make
Speaker 5: it clear that market craft is neither good nor bad
Speaker 5: and of itself, it matters. It's a tool and it's
Speaker 5: pointed towards a certain end, and it can be a
Speaker 5: good one or it can be a bad one. For
Speaker 5: green Span, it was financial innovation. He's so intensely believed
Speaker 5: that the more efficient markets would be, the more prosperity
Speaker 5: and stability would come out of that. I mean, the
Speaker 5: guy is writing papers when he's a young analyst in
Speaker 5: the fifties along these lines and eventually knits them together
Speaker 5: in his PhD dissertation, And then when he becomes chair
Speaker 5: of the Fed, Yeah, he does deregulate and take a
Speaker 5: lot of rules out of the way, but he also
Speaker 5: makes really important policy actions to encourage the development of
Speaker 5: financially innovative tools, things that we now know of as
Speaker 5: credit defaults, fops and special purpose vehicles and the kinds
Speaker 5: of things that did indeed significantly increase leverage in the
Speaker 5: financial sector, did in some cases mean markets moved faster
Speaker 5: and more efficiently, and he believed would ultimately create that
Speaker 5: kind of market discipline that would keep the whole system stable.
Speaker 4: So he had a goal.
Speaker 5: It was market it was financial innovation, and he was
Speaker 5: using the power of his institution to deliver on it.
Speaker 5: It's just it had disastrous consequences and he was wrong.
Speaker 1: Let's talk more about the event.
Speaker 2: By the way, I think it's really cool that you
Speaker 2: went and after, you know, after the Facebook, and did
Speaker 2: all this stuff, then you got your pH d.
Speaker 5: Well, we're still working on it, working on your PhD.
Speaker 2: I read Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia,
Speaker 2: after he was PM, went and got his pH d
Speaker 2: at Oxford and wrote an amazing book about hues and pain.
Speaker 2: So maybe there's hope. Maybe Tracy and I will get
Speaker 2: PhDs one day. But I hear different things about the
Speaker 2: history of what people call FED independence.
Speaker 1: And people in the old days presidents were always hectoring.
Speaker 2: The FED chief to do this or that and this
Speaker 2: isn't really that unusual, and other people like, oh no,
Speaker 2: this is a cherish thing, and we've that we ever,
Speaker 2: you know, interventioned by the White House.
Speaker 1: In your research on the FED, how unusual or.
Speaker 2: Usual is it for this sort of pressure that we see.
Speaker 2: Did presidents use to tweet to lower rates whatever the
Speaker 2: equivalent was back.
Speaker 1: In the day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, obviously it's a very timely topic given that
Speaker 5: you know, last week Pal was about be fired. This
Speaker 5: week apparently it was never even really considered. So there
Speaker 5: is a very long history of presidents trying to bully
Speaker 5: FED chairs to get what they want with monetary policy.
Speaker 5: It is, you know, virtually since the beginning of the institution,
Speaker 5: this has been a trend. Kennedy and Kennedy's administration does
Speaker 5: it with Bill Martin. In nineteen sixty, Lyndon Johnson summons
Speaker 5: the FED chair down to his ranch in Texas and
Speaker 5: takes him on this legendary jaunt. Richard Nixon is pressuring
Speaker 5: Arthur Burns. Reagan doesn't really like Vulcar so he replaces him.
Speaker 5: We could go through all of the examples, and this
Speaker 5: is different because this time the president isn't just pressuring
Speaker 5: the FED chair to do what he wants. He is
Speaker 5: threatening to take illegal action to fire him, which it's
Speaker 5: very clear in the Federal Reserve is not legal. The
Speaker 5: president can only remove the chair four cause, and similarly
Speaker 5: with the other members of the Board of Governors and
Speaker 5: so and it's not just a threat obviously like Trump
Speaker 5: has done this. He has fired two of the five
Speaker 5: FTC over at the FTC two of the five commissioners
Speaker 5: who are Democrats, also illegal in the FTC Act, it
Speaker 5: is illegal to fire them unless it's four casts. He's
Speaker 5: done at the NLRB, at the credit unions, et cetera.
Speaker 5: So I think this is a real threat. I tend
Speaker 5: not to use the word independence because I think the
Speaker 5: FED is actually quite sensitive to political and economic trends,
Speaker 5: what they're hearing in a lot of different domains. It
Speaker 5: is an insulated institution, which I think makes it stronger,
Speaker 5: but it is not a purely independent one. And these
Speaker 5: threats I think are really unprecedented and we should all
Speaker 5: be frightened by them.
Speaker 3: All right, So, speaking of things that might be different
Speaker 3: this time, we do have a president who seems very
Speaker 3: very determined to divorce the US in some ways from
Speaker 3: the rest of the global economy, the global financial system.
Speaker 3: The subtitle of your book is the one hundred Year
Speaker 3: Struggle to Shape the American Economy. You could easily have
Speaker 3: titled it the one hundred year Struggle for the US
Speaker 3: to shape the global economy, right, like, the US went
Speaker 3: on a very explicit mission to shape our current financial
Speaker 3: system and you do have a very chunky chapter in
Speaker 3: there about Breton Woods. Talk to us about why we
Speaker 3: should all, I guess, familiarize ourselves with things like Breton Woods,
Speaker 3: euro dollars, capital controls in our current climate.
Speaker 5: Let me tell you a little bit of the story
Speaker 5: of the breakdown of Brettonwoods and why it matters for today,
Speaker 5: because when I wrote that chapter, I had no idea
Speaker 5: that the dollar would actually be threatened as the global
Speaker 5: reserve currency.
Speaker 4: And this is real.
Speaker 5: So BRETTONWOODZ was this agreement that came out of World
Speaker 5: War Two that where the United States committed to sell
Speaker 5: gold at thirty five dollars announce and it would peg
Speaker 5: the dollar to all other foreign currencies. So this way,
Speaker 5: the dollar effectively became the bedrock of the global financial system.
Speaker 5: And underneath it there was gold, so it was an
Speaker 5: effective gold standard. But the United States was making the
Speaker 5: commitment to be able to redeem dollars for gold should
Speaker 5: a foreign country or anyone else in the market and
Speaker 5: want to make that exchange. Now, the whole system was
Speaker 5: premised on the fact that as the rest of the
Speaker 5: economy grew, the United States had to increase the amount
Speaker 5: of dollars in circulation for time, because as economies grow,
Speaker 5: they need more currency. If the dollar is the base currency,
Speaker 5: is the global standard, you need more of it. One problem,
Speaker 5: the more dollars you print, the less they're worth. And
Speaker 5: so by its very nature, you are not going to
Speaker 5: be able to deliver on the promise to redeem gold
Speaker 5: at thirty five dollars announce. So it's like a vice
Speaker 5: that tightens between nineteen forty, between the post war years
Speaker 5: and nineteen seventy one, when it gets just so impossible
Speaker 5: for the United States to continue this commitment, there's a run,
Speaker 5: and I tell the story of the book where Nixon
Speaker 5: summons every single person who runs any of the economic
Speaker 5: institutions in the country to Camp David, and they come
Speaker 5: up with a plan, and they end the Breton Woods system.
Speaker 5: They in the gold commitment, and they move into a
Speaker 5: regime of eventually it becomes a regime of float exchange rates.
Speaker 5: Now we make it through partially because price and wage
Speaker 5: controls hold down inflation for a period, etc. But it
Speaker 5: is touch and go for a lot of that period.
Speaker 5: And so then you fast forward to today, and I
Speaker 5: think the easiest way to think about it is, instead
Speaker 5: of gold being that thing underneath the dollar that guarantees
Speaker 5: its value. It's the institutions of American capitalism. So the
Speaker 5: dollar continues to be the global reserve currency today. And
Speaker 5: the reason that is is because we have had an
Speaker 5: independent central bank, We have had a treasury that reliably
Speaker 5: and always pays the coupon on its debt in a
Speaker 5: way that investors can believe in and expect. And so
Speaker 5: does people want dollars. People want us treasuries, people want
Speaker 5: these financial assets. And now two things are throwing that
Speaker 5: into question. The first, obviously is Trump's impulsive economic policy,
Speaker 5: which disregards the importance of institutions in the first place.
Speaker 5: But the second is we're flooding the market yet again
Speaker 5: with dollars and dollar denominated assets. Like the deficit last
Speaker 5: year was seven percent of GDP. It's not supposed to
Speaker 5: be that high in a healthy economy. And right now
Speaker 5: the plan is another six trillion dollars of tax cuts,
Speaker 5: which is just to give it for perspective, is as
Speaker 5: much as the tax cuts of Trump one point zero
Speaker 5: and the pandemic aid combined. And we're already at seven
Speaker 5: percent of g So we have another moment where we've
Speaker 5: flooded the world with dollars where they're losing value and
Speaker 5: the underlying guarantee of that value, the security of American
Speaker 5: capitalists institutions is under threat, and so you're seeing an
Speaker 5: unprecedented period and a potential run do it.
Speaker 2: Yesterday night there was a news story President Trump said
Speaker 2: he wouldn't want to raise taxes on millionaires because it
Speaker 2: would be quote disruptive to the and then he said
Speaker 2: that the millionaires would leave the country, which I'd hope
Speaker 2: most of them would be, uh, you know, stick around.
Speaker 1: But that's his view of them.
Speaker 2: But what does it say, you know, about even the
Speaker 2: prospect for market craft if people in government don't feel
Speaker 2: that they have the capacity, the political power, et cetera
Speaker 2: to at times bring pockets of wealth truly healed, so
Speaker 2: to speak, and to wield that power, or were they like,
Speaker 2: is there any prospect for positive market craft in a
Speaker 2: world where politicians feel that like they're subservient to.
Speaker 1: Huge pockets of wealth.
Speaker 4: I very much think so.
Speaker 5: So I'm skeptical in this administration that that's gonna happen,
Speaker 5: but I think there's all kinds of opportunities for positive
Speaker 5: market crafts. So the things that I focus on these
Speaker 5: days are the cost of living crisis in the United States.
Speaker 5: I mean, that is what voters are very clearly still
Speaker 5: frustrated about. Prices are up twenty percent from the beginning
Speaker 5: of the pandemic till now, and it's particularly concentrated in
Speaker 5: things like housing. I meaner can spend a third of
Speaker 5: their income on housing, and then if you go to groceries,
Speaker 5: and then you go to care, healthcare, childcare, you're above
Speaker 5: fifty percent for most families. And so we can craft
Speaker 5: housing markets to make housing cheaper. We can certainly do
Speaker 5: some of the zoning and streamlining that the abundance folks
Speaker 5: like Ezra Kline and others are for. I think that's
Speaker 5: a good idea.
Speaker 4: I kind of.
Speaker 3: Wondered how long it would take us before I mentioned abundant.
Speaker 4: We got it's pretty good. I think that those are
Speaker 4: good ideas.
Speaker 5: But I also don't think that you can just make
Speaker 5: it easier to build and then sit back and hope
Speaker 5: people show up. At least that's not been the experience
Speaker 5: in California. Like it's been years since they have been
Speaker 5: on this process of trying to change their laws and
Speaker 5: building starts are not showing the same kind of growth
Speaker 5: that you would like. You have to craft markets more aggressively.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of other tools, particular public investment. So
Speaker 5: we need a housing construction fund for multifamily developers to
Speaker 5: make it cheaper to build. You guys have had some
Speaker 5: folks on your podcast make who make this case. You know,
Speaker 5: the estimates are that for an investment of about fifty
Speaker 5: billion dollars at a federal level, you could get somewhere
Speaker 5: between one and two million home spell and that's about
Speaker 5: half the housing shortfall in the United States. That's quite
Speaker 5: a lot of progress. You could have an industrial policy
Speaker 5: for modular. So modular is the kind of housing where
Speaker 5: you build the components off site and then you bring
Speaker 5: them in. And there's this amazing time lass video which
Speaker 5: I saw about six weeks ago of an apartment building
Speaker 5: in Denver where they bring in the pieces and it
Speaker 5: goes so quickly. It looks like the Mike Sun places
Speaker 5: with magnetiles, these like pies. They're amazing. But you just
Speaker 5: see it, and you just watch this. This apartment building
Speaker 5: with seventy seven units go up in the course of
Speaker 5: seven days, and it's mind blowing. And half of the
Speaker 5: building that happens in the Nordic countries is through modular
Speaker 5: and so that's a kind of industry that I think
Speaker 5: if we had an industrial policy to encourage and not
Speaker 5: just public investment, but also standard setting making sure it's
Speaker 5: possible for people to get mortgages for them, you could
Speaker 5: see significantly more development. So I think we need a
Speaker 5: market craft for housing. On food, I think we could
Speaker 5: do reserve stock buffering on eggs and coffee, like I
Speaker 5: talk about in the book on care, there's a whole
Speaker 5: set of interventions as well. There's an aspirational agenda, is
Speaker 5: what I'm trying to say, that could help us attack
Speaker 5: the cost of living crisis. And this administration is going
Speaker 5: to hike prices through the tear of policy, not bring
Speaker 5: them down. And so Democrats are going to have to
Speaker 5: have another message and also the specific policy expertise to
Speaker 5: get it done.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a long running joke on all Blots that
Speaker 3: what America really needs is a strategic pork preserve.
Speaker 4: I think all agree on this.
Speaker 3: Okay, speaking of agreeing, one of the chapters in your
Speaker 3: book that I really enjoyed was the sort of behind
Speaker 3: the scenes look at Bidenomics.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you.
Speaker 3: Do get a really good sense of some of the
Speaker 3: discussions that take place, the areas of disagreement. The sort
Speaker 3: of protagonist and antagonist, I guess in this discussion in
Speaker 3: your book is Larry Summers versus Brian Deese exactly. And
Speaker 3: you were also involved in the Obama administration, like talk
Speaker 3: to us what you learned about the actual sausage making
Speaker 3: process of market craft and what sort of like how
Speaker 3: do people actually reach consensus on a lot of these
Speaker 3: things when they have very different opinions about how the
Speaker 3: world works.
Speaker 5: So I had this experience where in writing for most
Speaker 5: of the book, I was largely in archives and secondary
Speaker 5: literature in the past, and then the last third of
Speaker 5: the book is contemporary, and so the methodology just shifted
Speaker 5: to talking to a lot of people. So I ended
Speaker 5: up talking to most of the folks who had been
Speaker 5: involved in Bidenomics inside the administration, and people like Larry
Speaker 5: Summers and Jason Furman and a lot of people on
Speaker 5: the LM.
Speaker 3: Larry does like to talk.
Speaker 4: It turns out.
Speaker 5: I talked to a lot of people, and the person
Speaker 5: that I zeroed in on was this man named Brian Deese,
Speaker 5: who some of you may know. He has an odd
Speaker 5: launch guest. Indeed, he was the chair of the National
Speaker 5: Economic Council. The reason he's so interesting is because he
Speaker 5: was one of Larry's protegees in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 5: In two thousand and nine, he is on the Obama
Speaker 5: campaign and he effectively runs the bailout of the auto companies,
Speaker 5: and in that experience begins to see, wait a second,
Speaker 5: we can't just be bailing. We can't have the emergency
Speaker 5: room view of the economy where we come afterward. We
Speaker 5: have to be thinking proactively ahead of time about how
Speaker 5: to shape and build industries that work better. That takes
Speaker 5: him to work on climate change. And then all of
Speaker 5: a sudden the Biden administration, he becomes a director of
Speaker 5: the National Economic Council, and then he.
Speaker 4: Articulates this big vision. It has two pillars.
Speaker 5: The first is build, so that's public investment in climate
Speaker 5: infrastructure and chips. And the second is balance, so that's
Speaker 5: competition in particular, but also supporting labor and other similar
Speaker 5: kinds of initiatives to ensure that the economy is competitive.
Speaker 5: And boy, Larry doesn't like it. He is throwing rocks
Speaker 5: from the outside pretty much the entire time, and often
Speaker 5: talking to Brian and others on the inside. And the
Speaker 5: reason I think that story is so powerful is because
Speaker 5: it shows the emergence of not just a new generation
Speaker 5: and of policymakers, but a new way of thinking about
Speaker 5: the economy which starts from the premise of market craft
Speaker 5: and doesn't fall back into kind of neoclassical economic framework
Speaker 5: of market failures and externalities. And how are we going
Speaker 5: to fix things after the fact?
Speaker 2: I guess I have more of a politics question, or
Speaker 2: you know, we had this sort of nascent industrial policy
Speaker 2: market crafting, and then it looks like the plug is
Speaker 2: being pulled after four years, and I would guess that
Speaker 2: there must be a lot of frustration among Democrats to
Speaker 2: hear someone run on, We're going to build things in
Speaker 2: America again, We're going to build manufacturing right after a
Speaker 2: period of two or three years in which more plants
Speaker 2: were opened and more factories were broken ground on than
Speaker 2: any time in my life. And so what I'm curious
Speaker 2: from your perspective, I guess from a political sustainability standpoint
Speaker 2: is people seem to like in theory the idea of manufacturing,
Speaker 2: the aesthetics of it, but do people actually like it
Speaker 2: in practice? Or is like because it didn't seem like
Speaker 2: it got any results politically.
Speaker 5: I don't know if manufacturing per se is the thing
Speaker 5: that people like. And I'm a little skeptical that you're
Speaker 5: going to really reinvigorate the American economy by rebuilding a
Speaker 5: manufacturing sector. But I'm not quite sure I agree with
Speaker 5: the premise of the question. Trump is certainly not pursuing
Speaker 5: a market craft, that's clear. However, a lot of the
Speaker 5: people around him have spent years developing their own visions
Speaker 5: of a market craft that puts the state at the center.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about or in Cass in your book,
Speaker 1: for example.
Speaker 5: Well, or in Cass, But I'm talking about Marco Rubio
Speaker 5: and JD. Vance and Josh Holly, a lot of these
Speaker 5: guys who I think are the future of the Republican Party,
Speaker 5: who believe that we need state institutions to direct markets
Speaker 5: towards certain goals. Now, their goals are not really my goals,
Speaker 5: I should say that. I mean, they are very concerned
Speaker 5: about drone and critical minerals and national security, whereas I'm
Speaker 5: more interested in climate change and other things. But nonetheless,
Speaker 5: right before Vance became the vice presidential nominee, he was
Speaker 5: about to introduce a bill for a national Investment Bank,
Speaker 5: the same idea that I was just talking about from
Speaker 5: the New Deal era, that he believed as an institution
Speaker 5: would have the power to direct markets. Now he was
Speaker 5: doing that with Chris Coons and Mark Warner and folks
Speaker 5: on the left. But what I'm trying to say is
Speaker 5: it may be dormant in this period, but I don't
Speaker 5: think that ideology is gone. We're going to hear about
Speaker 5: a sovereign wealth fund in the next few weeks from
Speaker 5: this administration, and there's a deadline that the Treasury Secretary
Speaker 5: will have to bring a report on it. I wouldn't
Speaker 5: be surprised if we see some trace remnants there. Even
Speaker 5: though I am skeptical that anything meaningfully will be will
Speaker 5: be done. I don't think that means that it's that
Speaker 5: Trump's chaos can define the Republican Party for wherever and ever.
Speaker 3: We do have some questions from the audience that we
Speaker 3: should probably bring in. I'll start with one, obviously very
Speaker 3: topical at the moment, but how is market craft playing
Speaker 3: into the race for dominance in artificial intelligence?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean, so far, the federal government has decided to
Speaker 5: let the private sector, you know, develop AI on its own.
Speaker 5: In the United States, it's certainly different than in China
Speaker 5: and then elsewhere, and there hasn't been a market craft.
Speaker 5: There's been talk of it in the Senate in particular.
Speaker 5: There's interest in public investment. There's been talk of what
Speaker 5: we call public option for the cloud, so a way
Speaker 5: of making it easier for smaller companies to access computing
Speaker 5: powder to build advanced AI models. But none of that
Speaker 5: has yet come to fruition, And so I think it's
Speaker 5: important to say that, like, market craft isn't everywhere all
Speaker 5: the time. You know, lots of policies effect markets, but
Speaker 5: the craft and market you have to have, you know,
Speaker 5: policy makers with a clear intent shaping it and guiding it.
Speaker 5: And so far in the AI markets it's been more
Speaker 5: of a hands off kind.
Speaker 3: Of But if we had like a loan office for
Speaker 3: AI startups something like that would count as explicit market
Speaker 3: craft for sure.
Speaker 5: If Congress said, hey, we want more small businesses doing AI,
Speaker 5: so we're going to appropriate money and we're going to
Speaker 5: create an office over here in the Commerce Department to
Speaker 5: do that, they're there, they have they have an agenda,
Speaker 5: they're crafting that market just putting.
Speaker 2: It back on your tech founder for a second, kind
Speaker 2: of separate from market craft, but I guess it sort
Speaker 2: of intersects with this. When Deep Seat came out, people
Speaker 2: started really and it was before that too, but people
Speaker 2: really started to talking about AI specifically. Is this existential
Speaker 2: area of competition kind of like uh, kind of like
Speaker 2: achieving the nuclear bomb?
Speaker 1: Like who is going to get to AGI first? US
Speaker 1: or China?
Speaker 4: Do you uh?
Speaker 2: I mean, do you think of AI or AGI specifically
Speaker 2: in such stakes?
Speaker 5: It's a huge deal. I'm not sure I want to
Speaker 5: go to the nuclear bomb. That seems like a very
Speaker 5: high bar, but it's a huge deal. I think that
Speaker 5: the advances in AI, it's certainly the most profound changes
Speaker 5: in technology in my I think, I want to say,
Speaker 5: in my life. It feels more transformative to me than
Speaker 5: the mobile phone, which I think would be my bar.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's I'm using the models.
Speaker 5: My husband's in the front row, he watches me, and
Speaker 5: to use the models all day every day for everything
Speaker 5: from like recipe substitutions to you know, doing deep research
Speaker 5: on a particular topic. Of course, you have to check
Speaker 5: the facts, this and that, but I mean they are
Speaker 5: incredibly powerful, Tracy.
Speaker 2: I have to say, like I'm an AI user enthusiast
Speaker 2: for Tracy.
Speaker 3: I to watch Joe use the models all day.
Speaker 4: You don't use them.
Speaker 3: I do know, I do it, just not as.
Speaker 1: Much as way.
Speaker 2: I am an enthusiastic trier outer of all the AI models,
Speaker 2: and I recently got access to Mannus. Yeah, but I
Speaker 2: have yet to find an application that consistently enhances my
Speaker 2: work productivity.
Speaker 1: Really, Yeah, that's not true.
Speaker 4: Okay, headlining, I haven't.
Speaker 1: But I'm better at headlines, of course you are.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: No, but that's of course you are. But it's helpful
Speaker 5: to have a kind of sidekick to brainstorm headline Tracy.
Speaker 4: Okay, well, fair enough. Not all of us have, Tracy.
Speaker 3: No, I disagree with this. Like AI is a phenomenal
Speaker 3: tool for our day to day productivity, it just is.
Speaker 3: Why did I ask another question from the audience. I
Speaker 3: know you care about climate change and this is one
Speaker 3: of your big projects. So we have someone asking how
Speaker 3: do we make progress with climate policy in light of
Speaker 3: its politicization, politicalization and the issue of affordability. And one
Speaker 3: thing I would just add on to that question is,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the things we've seen under binomics
Speaker 3: was Oh, we should build more green technology in the US,
Speaker 3: and a lot of that makes sense. But I guess
Speaker 3: the counter argument to doing that is, if we really
Speaker 3: care about the climate, and if there is actually this
Speaker 3: massive sense of urgency to doing something about it, then
Speaker 3: why not get all the really cheap solar panels in
Speaker 3: volume from a place like China.
Speaker 5: Well, I think we need even more investment, likely significantly
Speaker 5: more investment than we got out of the IRA, and
Speaker 5: we need it to be better coordinated. So I think
Speaker 5: the IRA investments are still stand. Obviously, business uncertainty has
Speaker 5: just gone through the roof, so no one exactly knows
Speaker 5: what's going to happen. There are signs that the Republicans
Speaker 5: will keep some of the pieces of the IRA, maybe
Speaker 5: not for solar panels or evs, but for things like
Speaker 5: hydrogen or carbon capture or things like that. I'm cautiously optimistic,
Speaker 5: but we need additional investment, and then we do really
Speaker 5: need an institution whose mission it is to tackle climate change,
Speaker 5: and the Congress can hold accountable so that instead of
Speaker 5: just saying, oh, we're going to give subsidies through the
Speaker 5: tax code, where the government effectively has no ability to
Speaker 5: determine what's getting the most funding.
Speaker 4: There is an ability to say.
Speaker 5: Okay, this, these breakthrough technologies need more support. These other
Speaker 5: things are doing just fine. I think that's going to
Speaker 5: be the long term solution. I'm a bit I'm with you.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure that tariffs on solar panels are going
Speaker 5: to help us get to the you know, the tools
Speaker 5: that we need to combat climate change that we need.
Speaker 4: Trace is right by the way.
Speaker 2: I get a couple when it comes to AI, I
Speaker 2: sometimes be like, okay, we're in.
Speaker 3: I know because I literally watch you do this.
Speaker 2: Joe was at the I co host the Audlats podcast.
Speaker 2: We're interviewing Chris used tonight that your public library. What
Speaker 2: would be some questions I do ask that and I
Speaker 2: sometimes upload PDFs and just like just give me to
Speaker 2: the summary.
Speaker 4: So I wanted with me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, that is helpful. It's helpful.
Speaker 2: Someone to ask about student loans. And I'm curious, you know,
Speaker 2: people perceive the market for higher education to be broken
Speaker 2: in various ways, and I'm curious whether it's on the
Speaker 2: funding side for the consumer, the student, or whether there's
Speaker 2: anything interesting that you've learned.
Speaker 1: About that space.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so there are a lot of these markets that
Speaker 5: I would call gray zones. Is higher education a market,
Speaker 5: at least the way that I want to think about
Speaker 5: it most of the time, it's not. It should just
Speaker 5: be a fundamental, you know, good an opportunity that everybody
Speaker 5: can get an education.
Speaker 4: That they want.
Speaker 5: So I'm not sure we even have to use a
Speaker 5: market crafting framework to say, you know, college in the
Speaker 5: United States should at least be affordable, if not free,
Speaker 5: and there's a way to use policy to make that happen.
Speaker 5: But I think that it is due for sort of
Speaker 5: wholesale reimagination, and there is something wonderfully simple and direct
Speaker 5: about you know, Bernie's promise for free college that you
Speaker 5: know is hard to do, but I think it's that
Speaker 5: kind of aspirational guarantee that people crave, people respond to,
Speaker 5: and it's policy makers response to deliver on that. Of course,
Speaker 5: you're going to have to raise taxes, whether it's for
Speaker 5: this or some of the other issues that we've talked
Speaker 5: about to make that happen, But I don't know that
Speaker 5: that's the I think that's the kind of country I
Speaker 5: want to live in. I think that's the kind of
Speaker 5: country that most Americans want to live in.
Speaker 1: It's a great place to leave it. Chris Hughes, thank
Speaker 1: you so much.
Speaker 6: For joining us in this live episode.
Speaker 3: That is our interview with Chris Hughes, the author of
Speaker 3: Market Crafters, live at the New York Public Library.
Speaker 2: Really good evening, really interesting topic. One very near and
Speaker 2: dear to the themes that we've been talking about on odline.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely touches on a lot of them.
Speaker 2: Shall we leave it there, Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Chacy Alloway, and.
Speaker 2: I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Follow Chris Hughes on Twitter. He's at Chris Hughes. Follow
Speaker 2: our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash Ol Bennett
Speaker 2: at Dashbot and Killbrooks at Kalebrooks. From our Odd Lags content,
Speaker 2: go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots. We have
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